McLuhan's Understanding Media is a seminal work and one of the books that most shaped my thinking. "Electric Speed is synonymous with light and with the understanding of causes..." That line inspired the name for the Internet consulting company I formed in 1999, and espeed has been my online handle ever since.
At no period in human culture have men understood
the psychic mechanisms involved in invention and
technology. Today it is the instant speed of electric
information that, for the first time, permits easy
recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of
change and development. The entire world, past and
present, now reveals itself to us like a growing plant
in an enormously accelerated movie. Electric speed is
synonymous with light and with the understanding of
causes.
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
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